ne might be curious to know the answer, which is not given,
of the good father to this question. It is to be hoped that it was not
of a kind to induce the emperor to destroy the manuscript, which has
never come to light.

However this may be, there is no reason to doubt that at one period of
his life he had compiled a portion of his autobiography. In the imperial
household, as I have already noticed, was a Flemish scholar, William Van
Male, or Malinaeus, as he is called in Latin, who, under the title of
gentleman of the chamber, wrote many a long letter for Charles, while
standing by his bedside, and read many a weary hour to him after the
monarch had gone to rest,--not, as it would seem, to sleep.[355] This
personage tells us that Charles, when sailing on the Rhine, wrote an
account of his expeditions to as late a date as 1550.[356] This is not
very definite. Any account written under such circumstances, and in so
short a time, could be nothing but a sketch of the most general kind.
Yet Van Male assures us that he had read the manuscript, which he
commends for its terse and elegant diction; and he proposes to make a
Latin version of it, the style of which should combine the separate
merits of Tacitus, Livy, Suetonius, and Caesar![357] The admiring
chamberlain laments that, instead of giving it to the world, Charles
should keep it jealously secured under lock and key.[358]

The emperor's taste for authorship showed itself also in another form.
This was by the translation of the "_Chevalier Delibere_," a French poem
then popular, celebrating the court of his ancestor, Charles the Bold of
Burgundy. Van Male, who seems to have done for Charles the Fifth what
Voltaire did for Frederick, when he spoke of himself as washing the
king's dirty linen, was employed also to overlook this translation,
which he pronounces to have possessed great merit in regard to idiom and
selection of language. The emperor then gave it to Acuna, a good poet of
the court, to be done into Castilian verse. Thus metamorphosed, he
proposed to give the copy to Van Male. A mischievous wag, Avila the
historian, assured the emperor that it could not be worth less than five
hundred gold crowns to that functionary. "And William is well entitled
to them," said the monarch, "for he has sweat much over the work."[359]
Two thousand copies were forthwith ordered to be printed of the poem,
which was to come out anonymously. Poor Van Male, who took a very
different